Historical Quotes - Page 29

• Yet the companions of the Muses
  will keep their collective nose in my books
  And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.

  Ezra Pound

  Book, Data, Tunes

  Ezra Pound, Richard Sieburth (2010). “New Selected Poems and Translations”, p.92, New Directions Publishing

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• The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Military, War, History

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• Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

  Johan Huizinga

  Art, History, Conscious

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• One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music.

  Johan Huizinga

  Music, Mean, History

  Johan Huizinga (2014). “Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance”, p.54, Princeton University Press

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• If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.

  David Hume

  Religious, Religion, Details

  David Hume, John Charles Addison Gaskin (1998). “Dialogues and Natural History of Religion”, p.122, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary, Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970.

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg

  Reality, Rights, Texas

  "Ruth Bader Ginsburg Pens Scathing Dissent On Texas Voter ID Law" By Braden Goyette, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 18, 2014.

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• It is easy to see, though it scarcely needs to be pointed out, since it is involved in the fact that Reason is set aside, that faith is not a form of knowledge; for all knowledge is either a knowledge of the eternal, excluding the temporal and historical as indifferent, or it is pure historical knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Faith, Knowledge, Needs

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• Life cannot be destroyed for good, neithercan history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and uniquesomething truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

  Vaclav Havel

  Long, Secret, One Day

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• It is what we imagine knowledge to be:
  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
  drawn from the cold hard mouth
  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
  forever, flowing and drawn, and since
  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Moving, Knowledge, Dark

  Elizabeth Bishop (2015). “Poems”, p.64, Macmillan

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• It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

  Emile Durkheim

  Men, Analysis, Sociology

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• Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

  Franz Grillparzer

  History, Attention, Notoriety

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• Nothing genuinely historical was ever lost in this country. For this reason we have two ruling parties: villains and fools.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Country, Party, Government

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• Critics often point to historical issues such as slavery, upon which many Christians did act inconsistently, in an effort to invalidate Christian participation in contemporary social issues.

  H. Wayne House

  Christian, Religious, Issues

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• In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying entire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can't improve on these.

  Alfred Doblin

  Book, Writing, Objectivity

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• The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Writing, Race, Self

  Henry Louis Gates (1989). “Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "racial" Self”, p.108, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

  Robert Darnton

  Taken, Library, Research

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• As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.

  Robert Darnton

  Book, President, Library

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• Most readers of historical fiction are content to just get caught up in a good story, and that is what I want to do as an author. I am not concerned with people knowing exactly what I made up and what is real.

  Melanie Benjamin

  Real, Knowing, People

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• My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form.

  Timothy Leary

  Reading, Rome, Turkeys

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• Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.

  Joseph Boyden

  Wish, Narrative, Classic

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• What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves.

  Azar Nafisi

  Queens, Looks, Stories

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• Clothes make the body both mysterious and historical.

  Mason Cooley

  Clothes, Body, Mysterious

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• Collins masterfully blends fact and fiction...transcends the historical thriller.

  Jeffery Deaver

  Fiction, Facts, Thrillers

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• As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of today is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-experiencesof the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside of time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Time, Nature, Rain

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• Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.

  Helen Cam

  Fiction, Facts, Form

  Helen Maud Cam, Historical Association (Great Britain) (1968). “Historical Novels”

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